So, I was out at a client site yesterday to review the work they have completed so far on their Exchange 2007 deployment. There were two issues that we came across that were unique that I thought I would mention to the population out there. Hopefully this information will be able to help someone.
The first problem I noticed was the error message that stated Exchange was not part of an active directory site. This caused me to think, why would an error come up like this. My first instinct was to do a Gpresult /r (Windows 2008) which listed out all the information about the computer and user. The Computer said it belonged to the site Default-First-Site-Name. Ok, so the server was recognizing that it was a member of the AD Site, but why was exchange balking at the issue? Well, I asked the IT Admin to open up Active Directory Sites and Services and took a look in there. Looking over AD Sites and Services I noted the client had only one site configured, Default-First-Site-Name. Thinking a little bit more about the situation I asked to see what subnets were configured for the site. Well, upon review the site only had two subnets assigned to it. Neither one of these Subnets included the subnet Exchange 2007 was in. Talking to the Admin about this I learned that they had the same issue on the Hub Transport Servers and had to manually configure AD using ADSIEdit to insert the proper site name for the server to use! Eww, not sure how this will impact their environment in the long run but when installing Exchange this should all be done automatically. So, I had the admin add the Subnet to the AD Sites and Services and rebooted the mailbox servers, error gone, problem solved!
The moral of the story above? Make sure that you have your AD Sites and Services properly configured prior to deploying Exchange. Oh yea, don’t forget, you need to have a domain Controller in the same AD Site as Exchange. How the client ever got Exchange working is beyond me. The workstation was seeing the AD Site but Exchange was not, hence the error.